eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

July 2008

07/31/2008

Imagine that you are completely paralyzed. Your brain works perfectly but you are locked in, unable to speak, or move or make sounds. You have one eye that will move for you and it is your only way to communicate. Now ... how do you go about expressing everything you want to say that makes you human? Well, you have someone incredibly patient read off an alphabet like the one below over and over and every time they get to the letter you want, you blink once. Talk about patience. I suspect that you would chose your words far more wisely and intelligently than I do when I fling them out so freely in a blog like this.

According to Wikipedia, it took the author of the book this movie is based on 200,000 blinks to write at a rate of approximately 2 minutes per word. That means that this blog post would have taken me roughly 3,000 minutes or fifty hours (A week's work with overtime). How long would it take me to tell someone that they should watch the movie, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly using the alphabet the author used (with most frequently used letters first)? Lets see.

You really don't want to know how long that took me. This is one of those "Don't take your life for granted because you never know when some part of it is going to be over" movies. Thanks for the recommendation Flaura. Quotes from Thorton Wilder's Our Town come immediately to mind:

Stage Manager: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars…everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with people.”

Emily: “Live people don’t understand do they? … O Mother, I never realized before how … in the dark live persons are …”

Emily: Oh, Mama, look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama! Wally's dead, too. His appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's really look at one another!...I can't. I can't go on.It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back -- up the hill -- to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners....Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking....and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths....and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it--every,every minute?

Stage Manager: No. (pause) The saints and poets, maybe they do some."

Question for Comment: When was the last time you were reminded not to take life for granted?

The
boys and I have been watching the Battlestar Galactica television series the
last few weeks and today we got to the end of season three. I will not throw out
any spoilers here but in general, four of the last five unknown Cylons are revealed
in this episode and as season four gets underway, the mystery of who that last
mystery Cylon is heats up. The PR on season four has a picture of the principle
characters lined up at a table in such a way as to recreate the scene of the
last supper as painted by Leonardo DaVinci. It captures the moment when Jesus says
to his disciples “One of you will betray me” and they all react in different
ways, some accusatory, others with expressions of self doubt. As if to say, “Is
it me? Am I the Cylon?”

In the television series, many people begin to suspect themselves and it is as they begin to suspect that THEY might be the hated Cylon, that they begin to wonder if Cylons should be judged after all. If they are so like me that I think I might be one, can they be all that evil and unredeemable?

People
do interesting things with Da Vinci’s last supper to get all sorts of secret
meanings out of the painting and many a computer graphics geek is doing the
same with the Battle Star Galactica last supper scene, trying to identify "Judas".

The
series deals with numerous contemporary issues in its various episodes and the allusions
to religious, and specifically Christian themes is palpable. Gaius Balthar
looks like Jesus in front of Pilate as he is being tried. Lee Adama insists
that people are placing all their guilt and shame on him, seeking to exercise their
own consciences by crucifying Bathar (well, flushing him out an airlock).
Balthar often strikes poses that would give on the clear impression that he is
a messianic figure. (Early in the series, he is seen on his porch in a vision
with his arms outstretched like a crucifix contemplating whether he might be
God. Later in season four, he is thought to be a doer of miracles.

Ironically,
the first Battlestar Galactica was created by a Mormon who did not mind
including many terms and concepts from the theology of Joseph Smith and the
Church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints in his storyline. The “quorum of twelve” comes right
out of Mormon governmental policy. The sealing of marriages, the notion that
humans can become gods someday, and the whole notion of a "wagon train" of ships looking
for a home where they will not be persecuted is straight out of the Mormon
storybook. As the twelve colonies of Kobol (a loose respelling of the Mormon term "Kolob") try to settle down in "New Caprica" but are "evicted" one can see the story of the Mormons at Navoo, Illinois.

But
BSG is not just about religion. Its loaded with philosophy too. The ideas of
Satre and Focault and other existentialists who insisted that human beings do
not come “pre-loaded” with identity but MAKE their identity is central to the question
that characters in BSG confront. “Existence precedes essence” the
existentialists said. That is, we do not have an essence when we are born that
we must find and express. Rather, we are the result of choices we make about who we wish to
be.

When
characters in the series begin to suspect that they are Cylons (machines
designed to look like humans and for a time think they are humans) it causes
them tremendous psychic discomfort. The more they had devalued Cylons before
the discovery (calling them “toasters", killing them, torturing them, waging war
against them, etc.) the more discomfort they feel at finding out that they ARE what
they had despised. When the character Sharon Valeri is confronted with her “Cylon
self” she denies it, represses it, refuses to admit it, and moments later, her
programming takes over and she shoots her own commander. When others later are
confronted with their fundamental nature, they admit it … but then decide to
continue acting and being who they have been. They do not chose to repress, but
rather to admit and chose differently. And for that reason, their programming
fails to express itself.

Can
we simply chose to be anything we want? Whether that is what we have thought we
were? Or what we would like to be? Are we blank slates to write on as we will? Do
we belong to the communities we are born into or may we chose communities that
we believe come closer to the values we hold dear? Is the community created by
a group of selves? Or is the self created by the community that raises it? These
and many other issues lie embedded in the story lines of BSG.

In
the last scenes of the the Season three finale, all the Cylons in the process
of being revealed to themselves begin to hear the same song. Its Bob Dylan’s Along the Watchtower.

All Along The Watchtower

"There must be some way out of
here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited,"
the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept
the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat
did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

It
is a song about two dissenters (a joker and a thief – the entertainer and the
criminal – both of whom have a long history of challenging society’s entrenched
values) approach a guarded wall. On the wall are “princes” powerful wealthy
people who watch and guard their subjects, women and the bare footed poor below. The
joker and the thief approach, as if on the cusp of a hurricane to bring their
system of values down. The jester complains that his work is not valued as it
out to be but is only “sold” for profit by the business interests that “own
him. The thief reminds him that this state of things is only temporary. Change - its a commin - blowin in the wind you might say.

I
could not help but draw links to Beethoven’s Eroica for that too speaks of an approaching hero on horseback,
riding howling storm winds to challenge an exploitive and oppressive system. It is
interesting how much in common Dylan and Beethoven and the creators
of a Science fiction television series may have in common.

Question for Comment: To what extent are you today what you chose to be today. How different from that "projected self" could you have been if you had wanted to be something different?

07/27/2008

Ever felt different? Ever felt like the balloon in a tack factory? Like you really didn't belong? Ever wonder how someone with internal strength would set their internal thermostat so that it did not matter? The following comes from Zora Neale Hurston's How it Feels to be Colored Me (1928) kindly pointed out to me by my friend Denise. As it relates to the Toni Morrison work I have been doing and particularly to what she has to say about her work and its connection to music, I will include just the following excerpt.

"I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

For instance at Barnard. "Beside the waters of the Hudson" I feel my
race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon,
and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the
waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in
our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when
I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white
person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that
we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way
that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no
time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts
the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies.
This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks
the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it
breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen--follow
them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop;
I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww!
I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red
and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a
war drum. I want to slaughter something--give pain, give death to what,
I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their
lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call
civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting
motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

"Good music they have here," he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched
him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but
dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us.
He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

http://grammar.about.com/od/60essays/a/theireyesessay.htm

Hurston insists, back in 1928, that she refuses to dwell on the trauma of slavery (Morrison doesn't think American society is done yet and gives us Beloved). Huston writes:

"But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up
in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not
belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow
has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but
about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have
seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little
pigmentation more of less. No, I do not weep at the world--I am too
busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the
granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me.
Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and
the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made
me an American out of a potential slave said "On the line!" The
Reconstruction said "Get set!" and the generation before said "Go!" I
am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look
behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the
choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I
have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a
greater chance for glory."

Many would probably call her an "Uncle Tom" for seemingly aiding and abetting white people in their wish to just forget what they did and pretend that African Americans struggle, not because of what was done to them, but because of who they are. I tend to think that Toni Morrison would share some of these perspectives. She likes to compare her literary work to music. In a tranitional blues song, the singer starts out grieving for some offence, some hard luck. But then he or she gets up and gets on a train and moves on. they move on. Both are important to blues music.

Question for Comment: What wounds, hardships, bad luck, or offense is making it difficult for you to move on?

It is hard to know where to begin a book review of The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking
the Unspeakable Edited by Marc C. Connor particularly without knowing what
you, the reader, might be interested in. The following are simply some of my gleanings from the book.

1.Morrison’s work has drawn from Western literary
roots but it is primarily to be seen as an African American challenge to many
of the principle ideas revered in Western Euro-American aesthetics.

“An understanding of Morrison's work requires immersion in ‘ways of knowing,’
to borrow Nellie McKay's phrase, that are not necessarily a part of the Western
tradition: African and African American myth and language, African American
musical traditions of the spirituals, blues, and jazz, alternative approaches
to history, religion, ancestry, culture specific concepts and philosophical
ideas of time and cosmology that are often opposed to traditional Western
concepts, and many more.” P. xi

The editor insists that one must take both African American and
European-American traditions into consideration though Morrison herself prefers
to lean more heavily on the later:

“The double voicedness of the African-American text consequently requires that
African-American writing be approached in a similarly double manner, one that
is cognizant both of the specifically African features of the writing, but also
the Western, or Anglo European, features of that writing.Only such a double vision is capable of perceiving
and interpreting, the manner in which the text moves between the two
traditions.” P. xix

Some of the key elements of the way she sees things can be highlighted in the
quote below:

“Though Morrison resists clarifying what precisely [her] principles are, her
increasingly voluminous critical writings reveal four main elements that seem
to constitute the essence of black writing for her: the presence of
displacement or alienation; a close relationship between author and reader; an
oral quality to the voice of the text; and at the formal level, a quality of
music in the writing that is distinctively black.When these elements come together in the work
of art, they produce Morrison's own aesthetic ideal.” P. xxii

2.Toni Morrison, from what I gather wants her
novels to sound like Black people talking … better yet, singing … or maybe even
better yet, worshiping. She tries to capture the ways that people formed and
solidified communities with words. On this topic, I quote the book extensively:

“Toni Morrison claims that ‘writing is a craft that appears solitary but needs
another for its completion”. This reader response element that pervades
Morrison's writing responds to its omnipresent alienation. “One of the major
characteristics of black literature,” she asserts, “is the participation of the
other, that is the audience, the reader.”To Morrison, this is not only the hallmark of her writing, but the very
function of literature: “My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and
that I think that is what literature is supposed to do.It's not just about retelling the story; it's
about involving the reader” P. xxiii

“For Morrison, this means restoring the
oral quality of the language, and making it imitate as closely as possible “the
one other art form in which black people have always excelled, that is music.”
P. xxiv

“Reaffirmation of community is one of the hallmarks of Black English.Systems of language within the Black English
oral tradition are systems that call for the participants to reaffirm their
cultural roots, community, and themselves.One of those systems is call/response, defined by Smitherman as “stating
and counter stating; acting and reacting.” It is “spontaneous verbal and
nonverbal interaction between speaker and listener in which all of the speaker
statements (calls) are punctuated by expressions (responses) from the
listener.” . . . “response allows the caller to know that the audience approves
of what she is saying and how she is saying it; it is immediate validation.” P.
22

“Morrison allows the reader to become part of the circle of storytelling and
thereby witnesses.In African-American
culture witness/testify, like Signifin and call/response, uses the act of
communication as a metaphor for the unity expressed in the traditional African
worldview.The act of witness/testify is
the tangible proof that symbolizes or serves as evidence to validate one's
existence as part of the group.In the
oral tradition of Black English, witness and testify go hand-in-hand: one who
witnesses has an obligation to testify.To witness is to affirm, attest, certify, validate, and observed.Thus Smitherman defines testifying as a
‘concept referring to a ritualized form of black communication in which the
speaker gives verbal witness to the efficacy, truth, and power of some
experience in which all Blacks have shared.’” P.23

Thus, in many ways, her work takes us back both to the West Coast of Africa and
to the Socratic dialogs of Attica.

3.One of the central themes of Morrison’s work is
community:

“The great truism of Morrison scholarship is that her primary theme is
community.Certainly each novel
rigorously engages such issues as what constitutes a community, what functions
communities serve, what threatens the community, what help skits survive.As Morrison herself has said, if anything she
does, in the way of writing novels, isn't about the village or the community or
about you, then it is not about anything.” P. 49

There is a particularly engaging segment on page 54 about how Pecola keeps
getting thrown out of her homes. Like Jesus in a way, there is no room in the
inn. One home after another rejects her because one home after another judges
her by standards of beauty that they have been given rather than standards that
they have chosen. When Claudia concludes that the soil had decided to reject
marigolds that year, she is not criticizing marigolds but criticizing society.
Though marigolds may blame themselves for dieing, the fault lies in the culture
that fails to nourish them.

“Pecola is destroyed within her very community, and that community not only
fails to aid her, they have helped cause her isolation.” P. 55

“The Bluest Eye concludes with
Claudia's final meditation on Pocola’s state, in which she views the shattering
of Pocola as part of an entire economy of sterility and death, which embraces
as well the community and even the land itself: “It was the fault of the earth
-- the land -- our town.I even think
now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year.The soil is bad for certain kinds of
flowers.Certain seeds it will not
nurture, certain fruits it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own
volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” P56

4.My favorite chapter in the book is about the
aesthetic that Toni Morrison wishes to see replace the one that destroys Pecola
Breedlove. It is an aesthetic that says that any human being will become
beautiful while we pay loving attention to it and use our imaginations to
understand why it is worthy of the tangible love we bestow on it.

Toni Morrison's Beauty Formula
Katherine Stern

“The concept of physical beauty as a virtue,” Morrison wrote in 1974 “is one of
the dumbest, most pernicious and destructiveideas of the Western world, and we
should have nothing to do with it.”Morrison was responding to the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful’ - what she
took to be ‘a white idea turned inside-out’ that still reduced the worth of
people to their bodily appearance.Concentrating on whether we are beautiful,” she wrote, “is a way of
measuring worth that is wholly trivial and wholly white and preoccupation with
it is an irrevocable slavery of the senses.“However much beauty matters to white people” she added, “it never
stopped them from annihilating anybody.”

Morrison's impatience with the very idea of physical beauty will be familiar to
readers of The Bluest Eye, where the
narrator calls beauty “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of
human thought” and tells how Pauline Breedlove was never able, after her
education in the movies, “to look at a face and not assign it's a category in
the scale of absolute beauty.”In a
piece for the New York Times Magazine in 1971, Morrison wrote that it must be just
as well for black women to “remain useful” rather than to strive for a more
decorative status.The romanticism of
beauty worship seemed to her “a needless cul-de-sac, an opiate that eventually
must separate us from reality.” P. 77

“Critics have been fascinated by Morrison's treatment of the destructive,
devaluing power of white standards of beauty but few have tried to describe the
alternative approach to beauty that she offers. . . .
“In this essay, I show how Morrison draws our attention away from the visual,
the static, the remote, or idealized object, towards an experience of physical
beauty that is tangible and improvisational, relational and contextual,
involving mutual efforts to feel as well as see.Morrison does not merely circumvent Western
aesthetic standards, but invents entirely original ways to approach the
beautiful as work or process.In her
narratives, beauty depends on the beholder's craft or intention and results
from labor upon the body either by the hands or the imagination.” P. 78

“Morrison's emphasis on the tactile over the visual conveys an implicit
challenge to the Western aesthetic fascination with sight and corresponding
degradation of touch.Aristotle
considered touch the most lowly, animalistic sensation and Renaissance theorists
echoed him. To Vincenzio Borghini touch seemed ‘bestial’ compared to sight, the
most crude and most material of the senses.Leon Battista Alberti chose as his emblem a winged eye, explaining that
‘the eye was an obvious symbol of super mystique, more powerful than anything,
swifter, more worthy... it is such as to be the first, chief, king, like the
God of human parts.” Leonardo da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting, declares that ‘the eye counsels and corrects
all the human arts and its sciences are most certain.’”

“In general, the discourse on aesthetics has endowed the visual faculty with
objectivity, autonomy, and hence, dominion.Because visual sensation covers remote distances, its reach is
considered lordly and authoritative, whereas tactile sensation, limited to the
local in specific, seems lowly by comparison.” P. 83

“Beauty takes place in Morrison's novels when some active imagination makes the
body’s unforeseen beauty suddenly apparent.Thus for Morrison, the experience of beauty is much more subjective and
dynamic than its visual, static dimension would suggest.Beauty is ultimately provides a subtle, and
unaccountable, unpredictable response.And beauty is narrational, for Morrison is uninterested in any notion of
beauty unmediated by fantasy, storyline, the contingencies of context. . . .
For Kant, the beauty of an object must be distinct from the fictions that it
inspires, whereas for Morrison, the aesthetic object cannot be disassociated
from the montage of perceptions whereby it comes to be both felt and imagined.”

“By reminding us of the contributions of imagination to the appreciation of the
body, Morrison suggests that responsiveness creates the experience of beauty,
rather than the usual notion that physical beauty preexist it elicits a
response.” P. 88

“With an awareness of how Morrison tends to devise interactions between
physical touch and imagination, and how she stages beauty as a surprise effect
of mental imagery brought to bear on handiwork, we can reread the narrator's
strange self disclosure at the end of Jazz
and understand exactly how and why the book takes a body, conveying its
experience of the hands cupped around it: ‘I love the way you hold me, how
close you let me be to you.I like your
fingers on and on, lifting, turning. I have watched your face for a long time
now and missed your eyes when you went away from me... look where your hands
are.Now” … Surpassingly gorgeous, the
ending of Jazz is a perfect example
of the beauty of imagined touch, Morrison's aesthetic trademark.” P. 91

I confess that I am often amazed at how much
scholars have to say to say anything but by the same token, I am impressed by
how much I learn from them when I take the time.

Question for Conversation: What do you think about this notion that beauty "occurs" to the person willing to love others with touch and imagination? How does one go about changing people's ideas about beauty in a world so permeated with visual tools for contact?

07/23/2008

Beethoven’s Eroica
(3rd Symphony) was apparently written to celebrate the heroism of Napoleon Bonapart who
Beethoven admired as someone who understood that talent and ability should
count more than status and title in society. The movie, Eroica is a brilliant portrayal of the first rehearsal of the symphony
and captures the essence of the impact it had on different people who were for
and against the sort of philosophy of romantic individuality, passion, personal
charisma and freedom of expression that Eroica
celebrates. Between the second
and third movements, Beethoven is portrayed having an intimate conversation
with Josephine Von Brunswick who Beethoven would dearly like to marry but who,
because of his status in society, is unable to reciprocate. He is not nobility.
She is. The laws of Austria would essentially deprive her of custodial rights of
her children if she marries anyone “outside the club”. It is clear to see why
Beethoven so admires and celebrates the ideals of the French Revolution and
Napoleon in particular. Both he and Napoleon are living evidence that nobility
has no monopoly on ability and Beethoven is obviously furious about the system
of privilege and exclusion that he lives under. Under its rules of genetic apartheid,
he cannot actualize himself. And he is, quite justifiably pissed about it.

Like Pecola Breedlove in Bluest
Eye, he is denied the love and affirmation he craves because he was born of
parents without requisite title to such affirmation. What he wants is denied
him despite his abilities because of an accident of birth that he cannot
change. And I suspect you can hear him taking out his anger in Eroica. Against such a system, the
heroic figure struggles in the first movement. My own theory is that the second
movement is the funeral of the aristocratic system. It is to be mourned but … only
for a movement. For both Austria and Beethoven, the world can be reborn and few
pieces of music will make one more joyful than the fourth movement in which
that new life is reborn and lived out “happily ever after.”

Beethoven, I think benefits from the system as it is and
thus he will grieve its loss but I suspect that he believes that in a new world,
where the privileged are not privileged because of some accident of birth, he
will do even better. Ride on Napoleon, ride.

It is only when he discovers that his hero has just made
himself an emperor, a hereditary monarch, that Beethoven’s fury boils over. The
bastard is betraying him and he knows it. He is replacing one form of
exploitive order with another. And here Beethoven had already held the funeral
for the old system in the second movement of a work dedicated to the wretch! Had
Napoleon been present, the pen Beethoven stuck through the title page would
have buried itself right into Napoleon’s eyeball.

There is a great exchange early on in the movie before the
symphony starts in which some Baron is being introduced to Beethoven and
mistaking Beethoven for an aristocrat of some kind, asks him for more details
about his status:

“What rank? A land owner?”

“A land owner. Do I look like a
land owner?” answers Beethoven, “No. I am a brain owner.”

Like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, the Eroica is going to stick it right to him point blank, “my passion
combined with my talent is going to beat the hell out of your uniform , red
sash, and title, Her Von puffypants.”
I can just imagine him saying. "Sit over there on your throne and weep because when I am through wiping this floor with you, no one
is going to remember you or your &*#$@ “titles”.

I love it.

Question for Comment: Does the system that you work in reward merit or simply longevity? Have you ever felt like you had more talent, passion, and energy than the system in which you worked was willing to reward you for? How do you go about protesting when that happens?

I am presently conducting an online mini-course with students in America and Jordan about the subject of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray. OR more specifically about conceptions of beauty and the relationship between youth, looks, and power. I hope to learn a lot. It certainly has me asking questions.

And beauty is a form of genius-- is
higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great
facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark
waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has
its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You
smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile." Picture of Dorian Gray

It is hard to know exactly what the marketing strategy
behind Department store chain, JCPenny is but nevertheless the following
advertisement caricatures an assertion that Lord Henry makes about the power of
beauty.

I think we can pretty much agree that a beautiful woman or
handsome man can walk right into a JC Penny store and out again anywhere in America
and this will NOT happen to them. But most Americans at least will laugh at the commercial (and remember it)
because there is, perhaps, a kernel of truth to the caricature; people with
good looks are given certain “power” that people without them have to acquire,
if they can, in other ways (i.e. money, talent, fame, or association with those
that have them, etc.)

By the end of the commercial, chaos erupts everywhere. One
of the arguments that has been used against the use of American women serving
in combat in the U.S. army is this suggestion that they would have a similarly
disruptive influence on “order”. Perhaps, it is feared, the power of “beauty”
would disrupt the power of discipline and chain of command and even fear that
the military structures itself with. Is beauty powerful enough to make a whole
civilization come unglued? One thinks of the story of Helen of Troy, unleashing
war on Hellenistic Civilization with her good looks. It makes for an
interesting question. If there is actually power in beauty, as Lord Henry
suggests there is, can we assume that those in power without it, will seek
either to repress it or control it?

Again, we might look to history for examples. During the
high Renaissance in Europe, the Catholic popes used their immense wealth to
acquire the greatest artists of the day and to gain control over the forces of
art and beauty. Similarly, Louis XIV of France attempted to accumulate all the “aesthetic
wealth” of France and install it in his new palace at Versailles, thus
regulating access to all the most beautiful people and things he could. Augustus Caesar had Ovid bannished from Rome because of his poetic licenses.

One might also reflect on how the Byzantine emperors sought
to monopolize all the icons of their empire, forbidding people to even own them
in their private homes. We certainly would want to ask, in studying The Picture of Dorian Gray how Victorian
society was attempting to either repress or control beauty. It is interesting to speculate, if one could monopolize all beauty that existed in their country or all wealth, which would sooner acquire one the other?

Question for Comment: If we assume that the possession of beauty entails a certain
possession of power, are dress codes really about power? Are they about the balance
between order and chaos in society? Is the JC Penny commercial on to something?
Must beauty be regulated if social order is to be preserved by those who’s
power depends on reason, rules, and regulated human behavior? Is beauty simply too powerful to be allowed the freedom to roam around?

07/22/2008

I finished the Power of Art series today. Picasso and Rothko. I confess. I need help. Even the explanation of abstract art seems abstract to me.

I have tried to read the backstory on these artists but ... their work still mystifies me. I cannot figure out just why they are paid so much. I cannot figure out in what way they are serving me or others though their art.

Do a Google search on ROTHKO. What are others seeing that I am not seeing?

"The artist also now resisted explaining the meaning
of his work. "Silence is so accurate," he said, fearing that words
would only paralyze the viewer's mind and imagination." http://www.nga.gov/feature/rothko/classic1.shtm

Well ... OK but ... who of can get away with that in our work as communicators? Can I send a paragraph of letters to my online students like this

... and then, when they ask me what they are paying for say "silence is so accurate"? Rothko speaks of people weeping before his paintings. Simon Schama himself cannot speak in more hagiographic terms about them. But they just seem like blocks of color to me. I think I need help. So, I took a few hours of my day to finish my book The Story of Art and some things began to make a little more sense.

It all started with Whistler's Mother. (Well, nothing ever starts with one particular painting in art but humor me). John Whistler entitled the painting of his mother "a Study in Gray and Black". Why? Because his point was that the SUBJECT of the piece was NOT his mother. (The public, refusing to accept that anyone should be able to look at their mother as a prop in solving geometry and color balance problems has refused to accept his title and still calls it "Whistler's Mother") He was basically using his mother as an incidental subject to solve certain artistic "problems" he was working. Imagine a man working on a Rubics cube that has segments of a love letter written to him on it and him not being as interested in getting to read the letter as he is in solving the puzzle. The task he thinks of is "must solve puzzle" not "must read letter". Modern artists from Ceazanne to Whistler had been playing with the notion that a pice of art was an ideal place for an artist to solve ARTISTIC problems that he found interesting (color, balance, perspective, light, effects, mood, etc.). Paul Klee came along and said that he just preferred to start out with abstract objects in his work and if objects coresponding to reality presented themselves to his mind in the process, well then, he would let those objects take form, but only if they did not interfere with his "puzzle solving" (my interpretation).

E.H. Gombrinch hints at the fact that modern art has become unintelligible to many of us because we do not understand the artistic problems that the artists are concerned with and because artist no longer seem to have a "task" or a social purpose that we have given them to do. He writes:

"It was a fateful moment in the story of art when people's
attention became so riveted on the way in which artists have developed painting
or sculpting into a fine art that they forgot to give artists more definite
tasks. . . .

“If we do not ask them to do anything in
particular, what right have we to blame them if their work appears to be
obscure and aimless?

Anyway, last night, as part of my self-imposed curriculum on this subject, my son and I watched the documentary Who the #$&%Is Jackson Pollock? An entertaining movie about the value of art in a world that has converted art to business and investment. This truck driver finds a painting that may be a Jackson Pollock original in a thrift store and buys it for five dollars. She doesn't think it is worth anything really but when she discovers that it may be worth 20-30 million to someone else, she refuses to sell it for any less. Because it is not signed, but only has a Jackson Pollock finger print on it, it may only be worth 2-9 million dollars to a buyer (She still thinks it is both worthless and worth way more). To those in the art industry, it is worth nothing because its pedigree cannot be proven with paper. By itself, it is not worth anything to them. With provenance (a legitimatizing paper history) it would be worth much.

So, here is a canvas that is worth a few bucks, nothing, two million dollars, five million dollars, or fifty million dollars all at the SAME TIME. And maybe it will turn out to NOT be a Jackson Pollock original. Will it be worth thousands of dollars anyway because it was the "star" of a movie once?

What are things worth? What are WE worth? Would I be worth 20 million dollars if Jackson Pollock threw paint on me and signed me? What if he just left a fingerprint? How much would my value decrease per bath? Would I be worth more because I ONCE was an original Jackson Pollock? Would it be worth my not bathing? I read a story once that a family recognized Pablo Picasso at the beach one day and sent their son over to ask Picasso for a small doodle and an autograph. Picasso drew something on the kid's back with a marker and signed him and sent him back.

What does a parent do. Forbid the kid to go swimming? Sell the kid? Question for Comment: What are we worth folks? What are we worth?What increases our value? What decreases it?

07/21/2008

On the dedication page of the Chinua Achebe classic
novel, Things Fall Apart that I read today, there is a stanza from Yeats' poem, The
Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Yeats wrote the poem in the gloomy days after WWI
when it seemed like European society was unraveling at Versailles. Things Fall Apart is definitely one of
those books I would put on a list of texts for a course I would like to teach
on the history of cultural unravelings. The whole subject of how empires and
societies collapse from the ideas to the stones is one that has always
fascinated me.

“Like Yeats predicts,
Umofian society is undone from within first, and then collapses under forces
from without. Wright notes that Umofian tradition's cruelty to minorities
furthers its collapse. The people it casts aside are the ones who first join
the church.”

In a way, Nwoye’s “desertion” to Christianity in the
novel is the direct consequence of Okonkwo’s decision to “manfully” execute his
adopted son and Nwoye’s best friend. I cannot help but draw connections to the
way that Cortez was able to bring down the Aztecs by exploiting the animosities
and disillusionments of those the Aztecs had cruelly enslaved or taken hostage.
“If you are gonna dance, ya gotta pay the band” my brother always used to say.
You cannot sow wild oats and pray for a crop failure. In the end, Okonkwo’s
culture was undone by the defections of those who were not well served by it.
Okonkwo did well in a militaristic warrior society because he was “designed”
for just such a society. By ridiculing those who were created differently, he
in effect forced them to align themselves with a society that they saw would
serve their interests better. This does not mean that British culture was “better”.
It just means that it held advantages for some.

Okonkwo understands intuitively however that he will
not succeed in it and thus, he kills himself rather than adapt, and play second
fiddle to those effeminate collaborators that he has always despised. He would
rather die than be like his father, even if by doing so, he could have done
well under the new regime. Achebe leaves the reader wondering if Okonkwo is
heroic in standing by his values or if, rather, he is a tragic victim of his
own patriarchal machismo.

Ultimately,
any society that wants to endure, has to provide all of its citizens with
opportunities. Not simply its great warriors, its best orators, its most clever
spiritual performers, its mightiest wrestlers, its yam-barrons, and studs. The
fact is that the culture that Okonkwo loved and felt all the Ibo should love
was a culture that catered to his genes. It gave him status for his temperament,
wives for is libido, yams for his stomach, palm wine for his thirst,
appreciation for his generosity, influence for his ego, and titles for his
ambition. But he was one of a few who could expect to come out on top in such a
system and most others would simply not agree to die to save it for him.

“Only
a week ago and had contradicted him at a kindred meeting which they had to
discuss the next ancestral feast.Without looking at the man, Okonkwo had said “This meeting is for men.”The man who had contradicted them had no
titles.That was why he had called him a
woman.Okonkwo knew how to kill a man's
spirit.”

Everybody
at the kindred meeting took sides with Osugo when Okonkwo called him a
woman.The oldest man present said sternly
at those whose palm kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should
not forget to be humble.”

“[Okankwo]
was always happy when he heard his son grumbling about women.That showed that in time he would be able to
control his womenfolk.No matter how
prosperous man was, if he was unable to rule his women and children and
especially his women he was not really a man.”

Okonkwo later takes his tribes unwillingness to
fight for his ability to dominate them as a betrayal and hangs himself but … in
all honesty, can they be blamed?

Was the culture the British brought to replace it
any better? Probably not. And for that reason, in time, it too would be a “thing
that would fall apart”. Every human society that is structured to meet the
needs of a few members eventually will. Excellent book. Makes me want to read more.

Question for Comment: Do you feel like the system or culture to
which you belong rewards you according to the effort you invest in it? Is it
fair enough to you that you would fight for it? Why or why not?

IT is not an easy thing to write a book review of an
encyclopedia. By definition, the work is an anthology of thoughts by different
authors often overlapping. I picked this book up a few weeks ago and started
working my way through it because I am scheduled to do a workshop on Toni
Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in a month
and I have been trying to gather my thoughts as best I can. Perhaps what is of
most interest to me is how this book connects to others in the Aesthetics course to which it is
attached and to the CORE curriculum that it is linked to.

In the introduction, Elizabeth Beaulieu writes:

“Through
her novels, Morrison forces us to acknowledge that the lives we often overlook
and rarely celebrate are perhaps the lives we can learn most from.” p. vii

One cannot help but connect this approach to the
work of artists like Caravaggio, Rembrandt, or Van Gogh, all of whom would be
willing to marry or paint a common tavern woman or housemaid and portray them
as the Virgin Mary. VanGogh in particular could make a pair of old boots holy and
all three felt deeply about blurring the line between saints and sinners, even
as Morison does.

Another interesting connection between Morrison’s
work and the work of artists is the mutual understanding that both this author
and many artists share about the power of suggestion. What so many people find
fascinating about the Mona Lisa is the way that Leonardo DaVinci leaves some of
the most essential information (the corners of the eyes and mouth) shrouded in
shadow. The Italian word for this is sfumata
and it is one of the things that Morrison does in the way that she tells her
stories through multiple narrators who do not always tell us everything. Jane
Atteridge Rose puts it in the Encylcopedia
Article, Approaches to Morrison’s
Work: Pedagogical expresses it this way:

“In
a discussion of The Bluest Eye,
Morrison makes the following points, which could apply to any of her
novels.She explains that as she
developed the pieces of that story, she discovered that she preferred them
unconnected.She feels that the
resulting narrative, with events that relate, but do not flow coherently or
directly, that communicates the story of the fractured perceptions resulting
from a splintered life. . . . Students pondering these assertions realize that
they must actively participate in the interpretive experience to fulfill the
author's intent.” P. 25, 27

It would be impossible not to see the connections
between this strategy and the work of artists like Manet, Monet, and even
Rembrandt in his later work. By allowing the eye of the viewer to fill in
details, the painter or author allows that viewer to be a participant in the
painting/writing and thus the characters that emerge are more “real” to each
reader than they would be if completely described the artist creating them.

What is particularly interesting about this optical
and psychological phenomenon, as it is applied to Morrison’s work, is that she
suggests that the dot-connecting must take place in the context of communal
observation, not individual. As Lisa Cade Wieland writes in the article “Memory,”
“Beloved’s plot is constructed to
mirror the way that memories unfold.”

“The
plot emerges in nonlinear fragments as different characters remember their
experiences and share them with the reader and/or each other.Since many of these memories have been repressed
for a long time, the process of uncovering them is slow and painful.The recognition of the past involved in rememory
requires the effort of the entire community, and cannot be accomplished by one
individual.Like the central character,
Sethe Suggs, readers of the novel must engage in the act of creative
reconstruction.They have to piece
together the fragments and different accounts in order to find coherent meaning
for themselves.However the narrative
always foregrounds the subjectivity of any memory created.Morrison's narrative approach to memory in Beloved and in her other fiction allows
the novel to go back and forth between the past and the present, and blurs the
distinction between them. . . . Morrison uses the term re-memory instead of memory
in Beloved.This term underscores that to remember is to
put together, or creatively reconstruct, the pieces of something.However, re-memory does not depend on just
one individual subjective reconstruction.Morrison establishes a community of rememberers whose consciousnesses
overlap at times, and at other times remain independent. ” Encyclopedia, p. 207-208

Another fascinating connection between Morrison and the
work of artists can be found in the way that she uses her gifts to “smuggle
messages of dissent” into the wider culture that “pays her bills”. According to
authors Benjamin Blech and Roy Dolinor in their book The Sistine Secrets, Michelangelo, in his work on the Sistine
chapel, embedded all sorts of subliminal and not so subliminal messages that
directly challenged the world view, theology, and policy of the pope that hired
him. In a similar way, Morrison undermines some of the sacred authority of the
culture that later awards her a Pulitzer. Again, a quote from Lisa Cade Wieland’s Encyclopedia article on “Memory:

“Morrison
has stated that using multiple narrators in her fiction enables her to give
credibility to various and significantly different voices, which replicates the
complexity and polyvocality of African-American culture itself.Morrison's incorporation of multiple
narrative voices also challenges Western (patriarchal, white linear) plot
driven narrative, and replaces it with circular, nonauthoritarian narrative.” Encyclopedia, p. 244

A subsequent Encyclopedia
article by Fiona Mills on Song of Solomon
suggests that Morrison’s work in that novel retells the epic of Odysseus - only
in this retelling, the hero does not overcome his challenges as an individual
but only as a person who regains his ties to the community to which he belongs.
In Song of Solomon the protagonist,
Milkman Dead has to reconnect with the African American community rather than
abandon it in order to achieve hero status. Mills writes:

“[Morrison]
offers an alternative to western individualistic ideologies by rewriting the
typical hero quest myth.As such, she
insists that those ideologies do not work for African-Americans.” Encyclopedia, p. 321

As if that were not enough, the article discussing
Morrison as “Trickster” – written by Cynthia Whitney Hallet – makes it clear
that Morrison has, Michelangelo-like, used her verbal judo on several well
known folk-tales of the white European and American literary tradition.

“The
works of Toni Morrison reflect more than her mastery of folkloric figures, most
especially that of the trickster; her stories also exhibit her ultimate skill of
author as trickster. In an important
critical study, Fiction and Folklore: the
Novels of Toni Morrison, Trudier Harris discusses Morrison's novels as a
series of reversals, inversions and subversions of well-known folktales in the
rhetorical strategies of the folk narrative.According to Harris, in The Bluest
Eye Morrison inverts the lesson of the ugly duckling; and in Sulla, she subverts the traditional
fairy tale structure, and Song of Solomon
she reverses the Odyssean journey; in Tar
Baby she subverts details of Snow White
and Sleeping Beauty; and in Beloved she reverses and undermines the
traditional ghost story. . . .

However,
perhaps more important is the fact that Morrison does not simply blur the
common designs of certain story patterns; instead, she continues to confound
and confuse -- in true trickster fashion-- the familiar narrative models by
replacing the European American archetypes with African and African-American
folkloric paradigms.In doing so,
Morrison completes a perfect act of duplicity and becomes the ultimate author
as trickster figure.” Encyclopedia,
p. 355

Like Michelangelo, who used the Talmud rather than
Catholic church tradition for reference in creating his visual stories – who used
the church’s sacred text in the construction of masterpiece of dissent from the
social institution that they had been used to create, Morrison has taken the well
known story of the Ugly Duckling and turned it on its head in The Bluest Eye. Pecola Breedlove does
not turn into a white swan in the end but a victim of the folktale’s point
(that all ugly ducklings want to become white beauties).

Finally, it may be worth mentioning one passage that
has particular relevance to another assigned work in the CORE curriculum, Plato’s
Republic:

“There
is no figure in the Bluest Eye who
ascends from darkness and emerges into the light, who finds enlightenment and
chooses it over the shadows, as one of Plato's prisoners ultimately does.What we do fine in Pauline Breedlove and the
sugar-brown Mobile girls is the same unwillingness to step outside of the cave
that Plato's prisoners display when they are given the opportunity, an
unwillingness driven by fear and the need to exist within the false, albeit
familiar, construct because it is easier to do so -- because it is comfortable
and safe -- rather than emerge from the cave and faced the painful light of the
sun.” Encyclopedia, p. 272

Students who have been exposed to Morrison’s insight
now must decide if they wish to descend again into the cave of ignorance or
start acting like the media show they have been watching on the flat screen walls
of the cave serves them well enough.

Needless to say, there is much more to be said but that’s
what I have to say today.

07/20/2008

I confess, George Tenet’s book on the CIA involvement in
counter-terrorism and the war in Iraq, At
the Center of the Storm is something I have been wanting to read for some
time and this week, I finally got to it. I would particularly recommend the
chapter entitled “The One Issue that Everyone Could Agree On” about the WMD
diagnosis in Iraq.

I have to say that I appreciated Tenet’s ability to take
blame and refuse to take blame based on whether he believed he deserved blame
or did not deserve blame. Taken as a whole, the book admits mistakes and yet at
the same time refuses to take bullets in the chest for the mistakes that others
made. And I do not get the impression that he is the sort of person to take
advantage of the mistakes of others when they admit them either. The book is
full of “This is why we thought what we thought. This is why we said what we
said. This is how we drew our conclusions.” Some of the impressions that I
finished the book with are as follows.

One, People cannot be blamed for sub-par work that they did
not receive the support or time to do and few things are more frustrating than
being so blamed. Secondly, it is always easier to see in hindsight what
questions you should have been asking if you only had the resources to ask a
few. But any of us who look at our own lives know that. Thirdly, Tenet makes it
clear that there are those in the Islamic world who are just as, if not more,
concerned with the ideology of al-Qaeda as we are. “There were a few countries
that got it long before 9/11” Tenet writes:

“The Jordanians, Egyptians, Uzbeks,
Moroccans, and Algerians always understood what we were talking about.It was ironic that, pre-9/11, we had more
success in getting help within the Islamic world than elsewhere.” P. 230

I also learned just how deeply offended those in the CIA are
at the notion that they catered their intelligence to executive expectations. Tenet
argues that the idea of regime change in Iraq was not something that was the result
of Bush and Cheney demanding supporting intelligence for.

“The focus on Iraq by senior Bush
officials predated the administration.Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Richard Perle were among 18 people
who had signed a public letter from a group they named the Project for the new American Century calling for Saddam's
ouster.It is often forgotten, but
regime change in Iraq was also the explicitly stated policy of the Clinton
administration, and was the goal of the Iraq Liberation Act, passed by Congress
in 1998.$100 million was appropriated
to the State Department for the express purpose of seeking an end to Saddam's
regime. . . . America's promise to topple Saddam remained the law of this land
from halfway through Bill Clinton's second term right up until US troops
invaded in March 2003.” P. 302

To the contrary, Tenet insists that the Iraq War was more
the result of the executive branch NOT relying on the CIA for its intelligence.
He says that key advisors to Bush and Cheney were developing their own
pseudo-CIA analysis.

“For many in the Bush
administration, Iraq was unfinished business.They seized on the emotional impact of 9/11 and created a psychological
connection between the failure to act decisively against Al Qaeda and the
danger posed by Iraq's WMD programs.The
message was: we can never afford to be surprised again.” P. 305

“In looking back, there seemed to
be a lack of curiosity and asking these kinds of questions, and the lack of a
disciplined process to get the answers before committing the country to
war.And in hindsight, we in the intelligence
community should have done more to answer those questions even though not
asked.One of our senior analyst
subsequently told me that the impression given was that the issue of ‘should we
go to war’ had already been decided in meetings in which we were not
present.We were just called in to
discuss ‘how’ and occasionally the ‘how will we explain it to the public.’
There was never any doubt of the military outcome, but there was precious
little consideration, that I'm aware of, about the big picture of what would
come next.” P. 308

On several occasions, Tenet reiterates the problem with
funding side-CIA’s and not the institution itself.

“Feith’s team, it turned out, had
been sifting through raw intelligence and wanted to brief us on things they
thought we had missed.Trouble was,
while they seem to like playing the role of analysts, they showed none of the
professional skills or discipline required.Fieth and company would find little nuggets that supported their beliefs
and seize upon them, never understanding that there might be a larger picture
that they were missing.Isolated data
points became so important to them that they would never look at the thousands
of other data points that might convey an opposite story.” P. 347

“Trained analysts would ask
questions like, ‘What is the source?What do I know about the source?Do they have the access that they claim?’” p. 356

At the heart of his message about mis-information in the
executive branch’s decision to go to war, is the fear that the Nitro of the unfounded
assurance of the President’s advisors was being combined with the Glycerin of qualified
guesses of the official intelligence services to produce the lethal combination
we know now was the decision to go to war. “Policymakers have a right to their
own opinions, but not their own set of facts.” Tenet states in several places.

And yet, he takes responsibility for the mistakes while
setting them in their historical context.

“Because of the impending vote on
the use of force, scheduled for early October, a production process that
normally stretched for six to ten months had to be truncated to less than three
weeks.Even that was not fast enough for
some of the unsympathetic members of Congress who wanted the NIE, delivered
almost instantly. . . . Had we started the process sooner, I am confident we
would have done a better job highlighting what we did and did not know about
Saddam's WMD programs, and we would have sorted out some of the inconsistencies
in the document.The lack of time,
however, did not relieve us of the responsibility to get the information
right.The flawed analysis that was
compiled in the NIE provided some of the material for Colin Powell's February
5, 2003, UN speech, which helped galvanize public support for the war. ” P. 323

“We allowed flawed information to
be presented to Congress, the president, United Nations, and the world.That never should have happened.” P. 383

One of the interesting insights I gained from my reading was
how impossible it is to predict what will happen in a certain region without
knowing what YOUR OWN government is going to do when it gets involved there.

“Our prewar analysis of postwar
Iraq was prescient.The challenge for
CIA analyst was not so much in predicting what the Iraqis would do.Where we ran into trouble was in our
inability to foresee some of the actions of our own government.” P. 426

I particularly appreciated his suggestion that the problems
of post-war Iraq were a surprise to the administration because they had
expected the appearance of a ‘Muhammad Jefferson’ who would do for Iraq what
Washington had done for post Revolutionary War America. The problem was, and
the CIA probably knew this as well as anyone, that Saddam had shot all the ‘Muhammad
Jeffersons’ in the course of his several decade regime.

All in all, a good book. It certainly will not heal the
wound in the hearts of those who have lost loved ones as a result of the lack
of good intelligence but it is a reminder that it could have been worse. It
could have been much worse …. Had there not been people willing to make it
their life’s passion to protect us.

Question for Comment:How are you at accepting blame when blame is deserved? How are you at defending yourself from blame when it is not?